Day the World Ended

Poster tagline: HUMAN EMOTIONS STRIPPED RAW!!! ATTACKED BY A CREATURE OF HELL!!! Corman's early films, narratively speaking, look – how shall I put it – rather daft. The atomic "destruction of humanity" is portrayed by one shot of a destroyed house, and the post-apocalyptic atmosphere is evoked by a few puffs of artificial smoke floating in a few shots over the landscape around the house. This is where the vast majority of the action takes place, with a disparate group of seven survivors that their unwritten leader has jokingly called "the hope for a new human race". If Corman adhered to the unwritten rule that "we are most afraid of what we can't see", it doesn't really work here. Those few hints with a detail on the tentacle of the monster with long claws don't cause much terror and until about 10 minutes before the end, it’s a rather lengthy wait, when the most that can break the viewer's lethargy is the dashing girlfriend of the villain and her dancing in front of a gramophone, plus some terrible dialogues. By the way, the monster, and it sounds almost unbelievable, it’s represented – according to the drawings of one of the characters – by a radioactive mutated North American chipmunk squirrel, but it looks like a scarecrow from a children's carnival. It has a stocky human figure, a thick makeup of modurite on its head, with two horns and pointed ears impaled into it. It's not scary at all, but it's just a blast to watch :o) (2012.12.08)